LUBNA OF CORDOBA (A Woman From Golden Times of The Islamic World)
Lubna of Cordoba was a copyist, scribe, poet, royal library’s acquisitions expert, private secretary, and mathematician. We know very little about her, very little resourches we have. She almost has been forgotten. She was a woman with no husband and no fame either. Even historian and chronicler Ibn Bashkaval referred to her as “She excelled in writing, grammar, and poetry. Her knowledge of mathematics was also immense and she was proficient in other sciences as well. There were none in the Umayyad palace as noble as her” So today we are going to talk about this wonderful woman as much as we know. She was born in 10th century in Cordoba, which is a city was in Caliphate of Cordoba and is in Andalusia/ Southern Spain today. She was originally a Spanish slave and raised in the palace. That is why her fame grew faster around the Palace so after a while, she became the special clerk of the Caliph. After a time, Caliph was very impressed of her intelligence so he gave her; “all the responsibility of the biggest library in Caliphate of Cordoba” and one of the biggest one in the World.
She has travelled other big cities, such as Damascus, Baghdad, Cairo in her manager times of the library. She collected many books in this era so Caliph’s Library reached 500.000 books which was an amazing number for those days. She also was a translator who translated many important books of Euclid and Archimedes and also improved that with her own ideas. Also as we nominated before, she was a poet and a mathematician. She has many poems of her own and she was great at maths. Even sourches claimed that she was willing to teach people Maths and also she loved children so she was teaching some Maths to the children while she was walking of the streets of Cordoba until she reached to the gate of the palace which was restricted to access. But also Kamila Shamsie, a Pakistani novelist believes that she was more than one person, but all this skills combined to one person. There is some other woman called “Fatima” and she collected to books for Lubna. That is a speculation, not generally said.
She was very successfull in her own time and the history almost forget her. She was a woman in an Islamic kingdom who lived in 10th century so I believe that, the people need to know about her.
(A Woman From Golden Times of The Islamic World)
Lubna of Cordoba was a copyist, scribe, poet, royal library’s acquisitions expert, private secretary, and mathematician. We know very little about her, very little resourches we have. She almost has been forgotten. She was a woman with no husband and no fame either. Even historian and chronicler Ibn Bashkaval referred to her as “She excelled in writing, grammar, and poetry. Her knowledge of mathematics was also immense and she was proficient in other sciences as well. There were none in the Umayyad palace as noble as her” So today we are going to talk about this wonderful woman as much as we know. She was born in 10th century in Cordoba, which is a city was in Caliphate of Cordoba and is in Andalusia/ Southern Spain today. She was originally a Spanish slave and raised in the palace. That is why her fame grew faster around the Palace so after a while, she became the special clerk of the Caliph. After a time, Caliph was very impressed of her intelligence so he gave her; “all the responsibility of the biggest library in Caliphate of Cordoba” and one of the biggest one in the World.
She has travelled other big cities, such as Damascus, Baghdad, Cairo in her manager times of the library. She collected many books in this era so Caliph’s Library reached 500.000 books which was an amazing number for those days. She also was a translator who translated many important books of Euclid and Archimedes and also improved that with her own ideas. Also as we nominated before, she was a poet and a mathematician. She has many poems of her own and she was great at maths. Even sourches claimed that she was willing to teach people Maths and also she loved children so she was teaching some Maths to the children while she was walking of the streets of Cordoba until she reached to the gate of the palace which was restricted to access. But also Kamila Shamsie, a Pakistani novelist believes that she was more than one person, but all this skills combined to one person. There is some other woman called “Fatima” and she collected to books for Lubna. That is a speculation, not generally said.
She was very successfull in her own time and the history almost forget her. She was a woman in an Islamic kingdom who lived in 10th century so I believe that, the people need to know about her.
Prepared by Batuhan Şuekinci
References:
https://ballandalus.wordpress.com/2014/03/08/15-important-muslim-women-in-history/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03vd5xt
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lubna_of_C%C3%B3rdoba
https://almiraah.wordpress.com/2015/02/06/forgotten-women-lubna-of-cordoba/